I just realized this update was pushed on my birthday, that's actually pretty cool. Haven't been able to test it until today sadly.
So this is what I have so far from my first day of testing it. I'll try to keep bringing in additional feedback later since the preparation for version 1 is really important.

Bugs:
Spade's shotgun still throws him around. The effect seems to not happen at lower speeds but gets increasingly severe as you speed up. It also seems to have some sort of lingering collision box now that you can actually run into AFTER it is fired. I don't know anything about how you code your game so I am sorry if this isn't helpful, but my theoretical suggestion would be to completely remove any sort of collision box on it and make its detection box just trigger the damaged effect. There's really no need to slam a collision box into a racer in addition to spinning them out.
You can not leave the stage selection screen on the missions area, you can only select and start one.
At least one AI racer seems to get softlocked on thunder heights consistently. Somewhere around the bottom portion of the map

Criticisms:
I am very grateful that you addressed most of the things I had mentioned in a recent post. You seem to have perfectly fixed the problem with thunder heights ramps, and I am glad to say it plays extremely well now.
I can tell you at least made some progress toward fixing the bug with the shotgun, even if it is still broken.
The tweaks to Calico and Mao immediately seem to have caused a difference in the overall balance of racer positions, for the better.
The ice trap visibility change is outstanding.
The homing laser stun time nerf makes recovering from it much more possible.
Unfortunately it still feels overall like you can get overwhelmed by a multitude of attacks in a matter of seconds and get stunlocked until you're in 8th place where nothing can hit you anymore. I do not know if this is due to powerups being designed poorly or the AI prioritizing attacking the player ASAP. I can't really tell which the issue is since there is no online multiplayer yet for me to play against a full roster of human players. But it makes winning races even with good practice and skill very heavily luck-based.
Map hazards like the rolling treats on The Bowl are still really bad. It seems impossible to reliably avoid them without slowing down or stopping altogether, and you should never have to slow down in a racing game without the alternative of using your mechanical skill to avoid doing so. Getting hit by one allows the AI to catch up to you immediately, then you instantly get dogpiled by powerups and the cycle of getting stunlocked and forced into last from first starts over again.
These sort of artificial difficulty mechanics make the game not feel very intense and challenging, but frustrating and like you're just grinding resets until you get a race where you don't get screwed over by hazards, RNG or bad AI priorities. Don't get me wrong, the game should be challenging especially at harder levels. My problem is just where the difficulty is coming from.
I also do not like that the rainbow powerup is granted purely for being in fifth(?) place and has nothing to do with whether or not you are actually losing. A cat can get this off their first item box at the start of a race while really only being a couple feet behind the first place cat. I feel that the requirements for getting this item should be based both on position and distance from fourth place cat.

Suggestions:
If this game is one update away from the release build, I would suggest working on things like different voices for individual cats. I know that is a lot to ask for, but this sort of thing is essential for a polished game. Even if you use mostly the same sounds and just tweak their pitches or whatnot, some sort of individuality is great for both cosmetic polish and for making it easier for players to distinguish which racers are near them.
More distinguished sounds for every powerup would be great too so that you can more reliably avoid them coming from behind.
One way to moderate powerup spam could be to reduce the overall amount of item boxes on maps.


A friend wants me to play another game right now so I can't continue my testing tonight. Next session I'm going to try to unlock the new set of racers and test whether or not rokkit still completely trivialized all challenge in the game.

Thanks a lot for your dedicated development. The project has been going on for a while and it's very admirable how much effort you have put into this for this much time.

So update on the shotgun glitch: the severity is affected by your speed but it only seems to actually interfere with your character if you actually hit an opponent. I have no idea why this even happens.

For some reason I am unable to press exit after finishing a grand prix, whether I try with my controller or keyboard. This seems to also only occur when I have the bug that prevents me from starting each race with my controller and forces me to press a key on my keyboard in order to begin. I do not know what causes this either.

Also you can not unlock the next grand prix series without finishing the beginner version of the last one. Even finishing the intermediate and expert versions will not unlock it, you must do specifically the beginner version which is very boring and easy since the AI is programmed to let you win.
To add onto that, I think the reason the expert AI is so frustrating is because it's made to make you not win, not for any individual racer to win on their own. They'll aim shots at you while you're already stunned instead of shooting at the cat that just stunned and overtook you. I'm almost convinced the cats with the big rocket are able to turn 90+ degrees to splash you if you're behind them, instead of shooting the cats ahead of them. This is not very fun.

I also accidentally discovered that you can spam the first powerup in your cat's loadout during the rainbow powerup, which can lead to some hideous results. Not sure if this was intentional or not. I was able to cover half the track on The Bowl with the triple bomb trap with Reina and it was a complete disaster the next lap.

Hi! Thank you for the feedback!
While some of these points I didn't think about (different cat voices, for example), a lot of other things I concur are necessary to improve the game feel. Let alone the bugs, that I'm looking at right now.

As for the rainbow paw main weapon infinite shots, it's there by design, but does have some kirks to fix, like too many obstacle-type weapons filling the track, or weapons that can be used at a too high firerate. Adding that to the notes!

Hey, I did Treat Cup twice to try to unlock the next cup, and both times when I got to the results screen I wasn't able to get back to the game. Tried controller, keyboard, mouse, everything to continue onward and nothing worked. This seems to be a new issue.

Other than that, I have some more general feedback (and those pictures you asked for) that I'll post in the forums later. I love the cat playground mode, it's just too cute!

Hi! Thanks for the feedback! :)
I've made note of that bug, and I'm working on fixing it!